Greater moves are being made towards promoting and respecting children's participation and rights within UK society. Yet these are set against a backdrop of moral panics surrounding 'anti-social' 'youth culture' and as children's lives are becoming increasingly subject to adult surveillance and control. This thesis is an in- depth exploration of 10 and 11 year-old 'middle-class' children's everyday lives (in the home, school and public space) at a time when multiple, shifting and contradictory representations of children and childhood abound. Committed to privileging the children's own voices, choices and ideas, this thesis reveals how by beginning with a broad research aim and methodological design, the children were enabled to play an active and directive role in the substantive and methodological approach of the study. The research adopts a theoretically eclectic approach, drawing on the 'new' social studies of childhood notions of discourses and discursive practices subjectivity and 'the self positioning, subject positions and agency relations of power and resistance and the concept of 'generational relations'. Foregrounding the children's own agendas, the thesis reveals how heavily these children's lives are dominated by adult regulation, surveillance and control. Throughout this thesis, however, discourses of fun and freedom are juxtaposed with discourses of boredom and control. Indeed, fun and freedom were central tenets of the children's own theorisations of childhood. Whilst examining how constrained and protected these children's lives are in the home, school classroom, playground and public space, therefore, a significant part of this thesis explores the pockets of fun and freedom that these children found or created in their lives. I thus illustrate, how dominant discourses of children and childhood and relations of power and resistance both enable and constrain children's everyday negotiation of and participation within different spaces, relations/hips and time.